


Heart Stopping

by TSValing



Series: Light and Dark - Two Halves of a Whole [3]
Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, First Love, Nil introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 06:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19901611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSValing/pseuds/TSValing
Summary: He finds her broken, a breath away from death as the tide of war turns against them. But she wouldn't die, not there, not yet. She was too stubborn, and he would never let her give in.And finally, finally he understood.





	Heart Stopping

There was a moment when his heart stopped.

How many wars had he been in? How many lives had he seen snuffed out before their time? Fellow soldier and respectable foe alike?

He had been a soldier for longer than he could remember. His childhood felt like a distant, bleak memory – shrouded in shadow, dripping with blood. And then he was a soldier. A kestrel. A mercenary. A rebel. A hunter. Always fighting, killing, destroying, dying, living. That was the world he knew for over ten years.

His voice hadn’t even broken when the Mad-King saw his worth. Not quite a boy, not yet a man. But he was already a killer, already savored the warm, crimson ichor on his hands. He reveled in the joyous frenzy that pounded in his heart, numbing the bruises and cuts and broken bones that littered his body. He had come so close to death that day, tasted it on his tongue, but he stood the victor at the end, watching darkness cloud his would-be killer’s eyes. The satisfaction, the boundless freedom laid out before him – it intoxicated him. There was no feeling quite like it.

_Death is an old friend,_ he often thought as he stood over his fallen prey. _But today I’ll fight death if he tries to take her away._

Aloy was somewhere beneath that gate, buried in the rubble as cold, heartless machines walked over her. Walked over them all. The battle was behind him, fires raging high into the sky, the roar of the cannons drowning out the peoples’ screams. But his wounded heart, broken and remade by the sharp spear of her tongue, called him back to the gate.

His body ached. Blood dripped into his eye. Ash scoured his lungs. He stumbled over broken stones, searched through smoke and flames, through the corpses littered around the gate.

He heard the Nora boy calling her name and spotted him climbing over the rubble to search for her. The others were nearby, too. All wounded but ignoring the pain to search for the one girl who called them all to war, the one girl who could end it.

He spotted a flickering flame in the shadows. The wind caught her hair, embers twisting and swirling around her braids – perhaps the caress of her Nora Goddess, soothing her pain and beckoning her to that edge she had been walking since they first met. She was so still, so quiet, so lifeless.

Sound fell away in that moment when he thought his heart would give out. His vision sharpened, focused wholly on her as he rushed to gather her up. She was broken, helpless. Painfully beautiful.

_And pale, too pale,_ he thought as he appraised the bruises on her jaw and cheek. They made the rest of her fair skin seem blanched and white. But the ashen blue of death hadn’t taken hold, not yet.

“Aloy!” the Nora boy called out as he skidded across gravel to fall to his knees at her other side. “Is she – She isn’t – She can’t be –”

He leaned forward to place his ear over her lips and pressed his fingers to her neck. His heart faltered when he felt nothing, but then it started again when he felt the faintest _thump_ , heard the quietest rasp. The warm breath on his ear sent a shiver of pleasure down his spine, but the soft rattle in her lungs chilled his excitement with a sickening sense of dread.

He could hear the cannons again. Machines shrieked and roared somewhere in the village. He heard Uthid and Janeva rallying those who could still fight. The deathbringers were marching on the Spire. They were on the brink of defeat.

_They need her_.

He shifted to press his lips over her ear. He could smell blood in her hair, overwhelming the scent of wildflowers and honey that always surrounded her as they slipped into those acrid dens, washing away the putrid, rotten stench of their vermin prey. His fingers glided over the scar on her neck, along her jaw, over a soft but too cold cheek.

“Aloy, don’t you dare die here,” he whispered. “Don’t stumble over the edge now, don’t make this war be for nothing.” He leaned closer when she struggled for a breath, her body arching with pain. She was fighting. Of course, she was. Aloy would not give in. She was too strong for that. Too good. But he knew the sweet call of death could be deceptively inviting. “Follow the smoke and shadows, for here the Sun you see is a lie,” he said – the old healer’s prayer a bitter taste on his tongue. He never felt it necessary to call someone from the Sun’s path, never once in all the battles he had fought; but he would not allow Aloy to walk that path before him, he would drag her away from it as long as he still had life in his veins.

He pulled away to look at the Nora boy and all of Aloy’s concerned allies lingering there to see her fate.

“She lives – _barely,_ ” he said, glancing over his shoulder to the battle raging on. Mesa guards were struggling in the flames against wild, corrupted machines.

His ears rang, his fingers itched for his bow. That was where he belonged. That was where she needed him.

He couldn’t follow her. Not this time.

“They need her at the Spire,” he added as he gently set Aloy to the ground, ignoring how his arms ached without her in them. He tugged his pouch of medicinal plants and healing potions off his belt to toss at the Nora boy. Aloy needed all the supplies she could get. He wouldn’t let the Nora boy waste what she had before she could reach her true purpose. “Wake her up. We’ll deal with the beasts terrorizing the city.”

“I – I have plenty of herbs,” the boy stammered as Nil forced himself to stand, to step away, to leave her there in another’s care. “You’re wounded! You need them, too!”

Nil grinned, swallowing a moan at the fierce bite of pain that radiated from his jaw. “I’ve fought through worse,” he said as he continued to step back - _away from her_. The wound on his ribs throbbed, protested the distance, but he didn’t belong there, he belonged in the flames and destruction. That was his home.

“But –”

“Exhilarating, isn’t it!?” he called out, arms thrown wide as he spun away. “I’ve never felt so alive!” He grabbed his bow, savored the rush of euphoria that coursed through his veins as he began to jog toward the village. He could hear the shrill, deafening cries of a longleg somewhere in those flames. It was time to see if the Voice Of Our Teeth could scream louder.

“I trust you to get my partner back on her feet,” he called back to the Nora boy. “I’d hate to fight the rest of this war without her.”

It didn’t take long before he saw her racing through the flames, eyes sharp and determined as they set on the calamity around them.

Blood in her hair. Bruises on her cheek. Teeth bared like a ravenous beast. Steeped in shadow and light.

Deadly. Vicious. Utterly _breathtaking_.

And in that moment, in that single breath as she loosed her arrows on the metal demon standing in her path…

His heart stopped. Her fatal blow.

He was defeated. His life was hers.

And he couldn’t be any happier that she was the one to claim it.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I am still writing little introspective blurbs for a bigger fic I can't seem to write. But I'm getting there. I hope.


End file.
